>> jon: wait, that's it? a piece of papyrus 400 years after the life of jesus that has the two words "my wife" and then just ends. that's your proof. well, let me see if i can fill that sentence out for you. jesus said my wife, if i ever find one, will really have to like thai food. or how about this. my wife, question mark, no, i'm not married. (laughter) what would real life brick tammblin say about this news. >> did you know this stunning claim, jesus had a wife? huh? the stunning new artifact just uncovered will bring you that information. >> lucky lady. (laughter)

>> jon: what's with the vegas wayne newton cabaret matter about the marriage of jesus. hey, folks, how about a hand for these two newly-wed nazarenes, huh, jesus yoois and what's your name, sweetheart, you're a lucky lady, all right. moving on now. (laughter) hey, that must have been some honeymoon, huh, gretchen, huh? hey. moving on to our main story. the unemployment rate for veterans, 11%. 3% higher than the general population. luckily the senate today has taken up a bill that would help get jobs for the over 700,000 veterans currently out of work. >> on capitol hill legislation aimed at putting the nation's veterans back to work has been blocked in the senate. >> jon: oh, right, i forgot. it's time for our recurring segment, oh, right, because doing something would have the... yes, the senate voted

on a bill that would provide a billion dollars to veterans, a bill that would provide a billion dollars to veterans to help them get jobs in law enforcement, fire departments and or federal land. the bill was affirmed by 58 senators, rejected by only 40, thus failing to pass because apparently in senate world 58 to 40 is a losing score and you eat out of your anus and [bleep] out of your ears. (laughter) leading the charge against america's fighting men, oklahoma senator tom coburn who opposes on grounds of fiscal responsibility. >> if, in fact, we're going to start addressing the bigger economic problems of this country, you got to quit playing felonious accounting with what you are doing, which is exactly what that bill did. it's exactly the same kind of, pardon my word, crap that congress has done for years. >> jon: that's right. this bill is felonious crap!

(laughter) by the way, also the name of my jazz fusion band back in high school. i was... the senator... yeah. here is the sad part. that picture was taken last year. the senator and some of his colleagues felt that the proposed methods of paying for this bill imposing penalties on medicare providers who have been delinquent on taxes was a less than solid fiscal foundation. just out of curiosity, i'm just spit balling here, how did we pay for the actual wars that made these individuals veterans who now need jobs? >> engaging in accounting gimmicks over the years leaving big ticket items like war spending out of official budgets. >> jon: oh, right! by not paying for them! (laughter) at all! we didn't even put the wars on lay away and pay them down a little bit at a time. only taking the wars home when we were done with them. of course! we could have funded it, that would have been wrong for america.

obviously senator coburn was not in the senate when the war began but i'm sure the minute he got there he brought the fiscal integrity he is famous for to even the supplement war funding bills. >> the congress has taken a vacation while we haven't passed the supplement for our troops. the american people ought to be outraged that we would leave here before we've taken care of our troops. i think it's unconscionable. >> jon: what kind of felonious crap... (laughter) so once again, $800 billion unfunded for war, a billion dollars, but paid for in a way you aren't crazy about to help the guys who fought the war get jobs afterwards, we're not made out of money, people. and that's why... oh, right, because doing something would help the... we'll

>> stephen: my guest tonights the 42nd president of the united states. the annual initiative quicks off this thursday, please welcome back to the program president bill clinton. (cheers and applause)

>> thank you, thank you. >> jon: let me ask you, so give any good speeches lately? or, how did that feel at the convention? could you tell that you were crushing it as you were doing it? did you feel that? >> yes and no but, you know, what i mean by that is i work so hard on that, for weeks and weeks and weeks. and then the white house designated bruce reed who worked for vice president biden now, and worked with me for eight years. >> jon: right. >> and worked with erskine bowles on that budget project to help me. and gene sperling, the national economics adviser who also worked with me for eight years came in and we worked the last day and a half after doing all this other work. and i was just determined to get the facts right and i,

and to simplify the argument. >> right. >> without being simplistic. i didn't want to talk down to people. i wanted to explain what i thought was going on. >> jon: that's what was so stunning, i think, that was why it was such a bracing speech. the phrase you mentioned earlier about getting the facts right. the idea that you would us use... you would use, in your argument, i know this is interesting, that you thought would you utilize in your artifacts. (laughter) >> jon: and they would have... you would attach numbers to them, that were real. i thought was a bold choice on your part. >> well, you know, we were talking before the show started, i think just forget about politics. think about any time in your life you have been confused or angry or frightened or resentful or anything, and you didn't know what was going on.

in those moments explanation is way more important than el consequence. and rhetoric falls on deaf ears, so the only chance i have to get anybody to really listen was to say, look, here is what i think happened. boom, boom, boom, boom. and one of my favorite responses came from a guy who said i'm a conservative republican, i never voted for clinton. i never even thought he was eloquent, but he treated me like a grown-up. and i appreciated that. because the american people are plenty smart enough to figure all this out. but you know, i have a wife with a traveling job so i'm home alone a lot. and... . >> jon: what does she do, what line of work is she in, that's interesting. >> depends on what day it is. but seriously, and i was president and i was a governor for 12 years and a grap well all kinds of economic challenges. and i have the time now to spend an hour or two a day trying to work this out.

and yeah, you can get all kinds of information off the internet but you can't be sure if it is right or not. and there are all these dispar at facts out there. so what i fried to do is to organize the information in a way i thought would be most helpful to people and make the arguments that i believe that persuade me that the course that the president is taking is better than the one advocated by governor romney. i tried to do it in a calm way without calling anybody any names or getting anybody mad. i thought they had been a little rough on him on that well fare and medicare rip they are on. so i had a little fun with that, but otherwise. >> jon: but that's what we were so surprised because people took to it in a manner as though you had brought high rhetoric from the mountain it was in its simplicity, i think, that is what... it was almost as though you brought something to people and they were eating it and they were like oh my god there sun real, i

have never had it. and you are like, it's pizza. the simplicity of it... . >> i think the american people take this election seriously. they know they have to make choices that will affect their lives. >> jon: uh-huh. >> and it's not very helpful if you take up their time and you don't explain what those choices are, at least from your point of view. so that's what i tried to do. >> jon: are you surprised, it has struck me that the romney campaign has been very year that they don't want to give the specifics of that choice. they have been given a chance time and time again. well, what loopholes would you close, well, you know, i will work that out after i'm elected. see me about that after the election. surprising with a guy of that kind of business experience that you are dealing in numbers and you would think specifics. >> well, part of the problem that he has is that... . >> jon: part of. >> yeah, he made all these commitments in the primary

campaign. and you remember, and they just kept pushing everybody to the right. and so seemed like every week there was a new challenger coming up and he was playing whack-a-mole, he had to knock them down. >> jon: very kind of you, even mole i think is actually... . >> in the course of that he wound up with a lot of commitments. so i mean, just think about, this debt is a terrible problem. he said that you know, and they ran that little debt clock up. well, it will be a problem when interest rate goes up if we don't, as i said if we don't deal with it, it will deal with us. and we won't like it, none of us, without regard to party. but if i come to you and i say we have this terrible national debt and here is my opening gambit, first thing i will do is increase it by 5 trillion dollars over a decade by doing another round of tax cuts, it mostly benefits the people that we benefiting in the last decade even though it didn't produce jobs. now we're in a really deep

hole, much bigger than this clock i just showed you. now let me tell you how we're going to get out of it. well, what about the details. see me about that after the election. >> right. i wanted to try to explain that in simple terms. no one else would do that. no one... unless you were being driven by ideology instead of by evidence, this is a practical country. we have ideals, we have philosophies. but the problem with any ideology is it gives the answer before you look at the evidence. so you have to mull the evidence to get the answer that you've already decided you've got to have. if doesn't work that way. building an economy, rebuilding an economy, is it hard, practical, nuts and bolts. >> jon: when we come back we will talk about the clinton global initiative.

wilt come back, we're here about former president bill clinton. are you certain of, it's the

clinton global initiative. how many years is this now. >> eight. >> here is what is going to be, you are going to there, president obama is going to be there. mitt romney is going to be there. condoleezza rice is going to be there. egyptian president mohammed morse sygoing to be there. how do you get knees people... what kind of food do you serve? how do you get a group like this together in cooperation to move forward? what's the pitch? >> and the leader of libya is going to be there. and the american people will hear from him that he really liked the american ambassador who was killed. and that they tried to save his life. and that he wants america to stay there. >> jon: right. >> so there are a lot of interesting things. but we started doing this, they come because it's at the opening of the u.n.. a lot of them are going to be in new york. we invite them all to come. we invite many of them to participate.

ellen general son turley, nobel prize winning president of liberia, a good friend of mine, she has been to a lot of our programs, a lot of these people come year in, year out. the secretary-general of the u.n. and president of the world bank dr. jim kim and the president of wal-mart are going to be there at the opening to talk about-- . >> jon: does he greet people as they walk in? >> no, he hires unemployed senior citizens like me to do that. but... . >> jon: all right, fair enough. >> but look, here's why he is coming. and i got him to change his schedule to come for this reason. wal-mart has deployed more photo voltaics on their building than any other company in america. they are the number one solar company in america now. and they also run some of their buildings with wind energy. and they also have cut their packaging.

and i want him to describe what i am trying to get people to think about, which is, most people make money and decide i want to do something good. that's a noble and good thing. they have decided instead to go back to square one and say what good do we want. we want to avoid the worst consequence of global warming. we want to cut our energy bill, we want to make it more predictable over the long run. how should we design our stores. how should we design our truck routes, how should we designed way we package our products from the beginning to get where we want to go in the end. we're trying to get people to think about, instead of fixing things when we get comfortable, how can we all at every income level, we're also flying nongovernmental groups in from some of the poorest countries in the world to be a part of this debate. how do you have the maximum impact by thinking more about it in the beginning, how you are going to do something in the first place. that is what we are focus on this year. and it's really quite exciting. but even it is at the nexus of what the future of the

partnership between government and ngos and private industry will be. and it's what you were talking about earlier, this idea that these are not an tag nis stick forces. they can be counterveiling forces but they must at some level be symbiotic. they must work together. >> let me give you an example of the places in america that are doing well. anybody here from san diego? san diego is... there you go. one of our great naval cities, and it still is. but it is also the center of human genome research in america. private sector, craig vinner was in a race in affect with the international government con sorecious with the sequencing genome in 20 thousand. started with a bipartisan commitment to federal research at the end of president bush's term and i put $3 billion of your money in it. >> jon: mine... . >> and it's already, i was

at st. jude's children's hospital in memphis just about three weeks ago looking at children whose lives have been saved because we now can see how their difference, genetic difference require different medicine to cure the same kind of cancer it was unbelievable. okay. so you have got his foundation, and then you've got the university of california san diego medical diag putting out all these scientists. you have the republican mayor of san diego inviting people in, and the biggest computer company, qualcomm headed by a democrat, and they have spawned 700 more computer companies. and san diego, why? because you have the government, the nonprofit sector, and the business is sector working together to do this. orlando has 100 computer simulation companies, why? disney world, universal theme park, they need those

computer simulators. the global ent tainted. arch video game, anybody that has ever been like me hooked on a video game knows that you have to have good simulation to keep yourself in a constant state of anxiety... and wait a minute, and the defense department and nasa and they all put money in there together and the university of central florida has 63,000 students, they feed them in. why are they doing that? because when they work together, they are so much more powerful than when they sit around and fight all the time. what is the result, 100 new computer simulation companies. that is what is working in america today. look, this economics is not ideology. it's hard work. and it's seeing what the competition is doing. analyzing the alternative. >> jon: results oriented, merit its oriented. >> and keeping score, that is what america needs, we need to gent the show on the road here and stop all this kind of mindless and

fighting. (cheers and applause) >> jon: ladies and gentlemen, president bill clinton, we'll be right back.

captioning sponsored by comedy central captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> jon: that's our show, everybody, by the way, anything that was edited out of the president clinton interview that we couldn't fit on the show, we have put on the web, if it will fit. join us, leer it is your moment of zen. >> one last thought, you guys, when i was a boy, when i was a boy i used to think that becoming rich and becoming famous would make becoming famous would make me happy. becoming famous would make me happy. - hey! who deleted last week's episode of bones? i heard they kissed. - where is it? - i know! - where is it? - where's what? - limited edition lap hog x.l. condom. who took it?